An Omaha, Nebraska, man asks about the origin of the term bear-caught, which applies to someone with sunstroke or heat exhaustion. The point of popularization for this expression appears to be a 1965 book by Donn Pearce and its subsequent movie...
John Webster’s 1623 tragedy The Duchess of Malfi includes the memorable line: “Glories, like glowworms, afar off shine bright, / But looked to near have neither heat nor light.” Much later, Stephen Crane expressed a similar idea in...
The term no-see-ums refers to those pesky gnats that come out in the heat and humidity and are so tiny they’re almost invisible. The term goes back at least as far as the 1830s, and is heard particularly in the Northeastern United States. This...
Professional wrestling may be staged, but its insider vocabulary is vivid and precise. The PW Torch newsletter’s online glossary records phrases such as red means green, the old ringside saying that a wrestler who bleeds during a bout earns a...
Jennifer from Racine, Wisconsin, uses hooptie — also spelled hoopty or hoopdee — for her aging 1988 Mazda RX-7 convertible, despite her husband’s doubts that the word is real. The slang dates at least to the 1960s, when it could simply mean a car or...
Does turn up the A.C. mean make the room cooler or raise the thermostat and make it warmer? Kirsten from Tucson, Arizona, asks about the tricky little word up, because with heat, the machine’s effort and the temperature both rise, while with air...